Pedagogy is enhanced to facilitate collaboration and immersive learning. Professors incorporate blended learning and flipped classroom models to maximize in-class discussions. It also saves students time and money.
Streamlined on attaining skills
Blocks incorporate complementary activities to enhance students’ knowledge and skills and to help students move more quickly from remedial to standard academic levels. Courses are structured to maximize students’ acquisition of employability and 21st-century skills—foundational skills (literacy, numeracy, cultural and civic); competencies (critical thinking, creativity, communication, collaboration); and character traits (curiosity, initiative, persistence, adaptability, leadership, social and cultural awareness).
Assessments, both formative and summative, are frequent and contained within the block to provide students with timely and impactful feedback so that, before incurring an entire semester of debt, students have a good sense of how well they are doing or whether or not they like college life at all.
The Vic Uni block model has received high accolades, including the 2018 IEAA Excellence Award for Innovation. The block model was so successful at the university that officials have decided to expand it beyond the first-year class and are planning to eventually convert the entire university, including career and technical education programs, to the block model.
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Under the Vic Uni block model, the number of first-year students receiving the two highest grade levels jumped by more than 43 percent. More than 50 percent for international students. The first-year student retention rate climbed to 88 percent.
Because Vic Uni’s success was largely inspired by the American block model, university officials hope to share this new, international version of the block model with U.S. institutions.
Wayne Wheeler is director of international programs and services at the American Association of Community Colleges.
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